Wow, the number of responses is amazing! I never expected so much support and I am very grateful to each of you.

Sigurd,

Thank you very much for your excellent program! I use it because of its flexibility, ease of use, and the fact that it adapts to my mistakes. It seems to me, the ability to adapt to my errors and provide those characters more often provides a more accurate assessment of my progress. The only addition I would love to see is the ability to track my progress over time, but I can do that manually.

John,

Yes, I type responses back into Sigurd's software and it evaluates my responses in real time and adapts presenting the characters most often missed the most.

Scott,

Thank you for your words of encouragement. I am still working through what parts of my day practicing best fits in, but I will find time as this is something I am very excited to learn and I find it a challenge.

Rob,

I understand what you mean. I find that moment exists with each letter.. lol

Charles,

Thank you. I look forward to getting to that stage. Callsign practice is what I plan to do after getting comfortable with all of the characters. Some time practicing callsigns and other times practicing common words is the current plan.

John,

I look forward to reaching that point. Right now I think my "zoning out" is more of a brain overload. I have to consciously bring myself back and keep going.

I think you will find that the alphabet characters come fairly quickly. But remember that when you have all 26 characters down, you are halfway done. The numbers, punctuation, and pro-signs is where I started getting hung up. Then you have to get online and learn all of the cw lingo and abbreviations before you can really communicate. I am not trying to discourage you. On the contrary, I am having great fun learning CW because I love a challenge and have not set any artificial time limits on myself. You'll get there, just never give up and have fun with it. You can do it!

Guys, I have grown tired of reading about how to learn CW and decided to start actually doing it! I am using the "Just Learn Morse Code" program and I am on my fourth letter after my first session using a 20WPM character speed and a 15WPM spacing. I get very anxious when going through the exercises, and if I get stuck on a character or doubt my answer, I dwell on it causing me to miss even more characters. I expect the proper thing to do is just to "let go" and not worry about that lost bit. Does anybody have any alternate suggestions or ideas that might help?73Robert

Robert, I too am determined I WILL conquer this code thing. I've been using Just Learn Morse Code program also. THANK YOU SIGURD!I got up to 8 characters at 20 WPM copying by pencil & paper. Lots easier to learn it at 20wpm now, rather than 10wpm, then try to speed up later (after knowing all 40 characters) Then I came across a forum thread discussing the merits of loosing the pencil & paper, and instead, copy in the head. I've become a convert, because I saw my own inability to comprehend what I was writing in real time. It's like I had an AUTO HAND, that was mindlessly scribbling. I was way to concerned about writing & not comprehending. (pencil hand kinda cramped too) Isn't comprehending what code is all about? A poster on this forum said he saw himself doing this with a typewriter, also. He, being very accurate, but having NO IDEA WHAT the meaning of the text was that he was actually typing. I have had to REALLY SLOW down in learning code, to build my mental buffer not only build my letter recognition, but assemble WORDS in my mind WHILE listening to 4, 5, & 6 letter groups (which are actually words). Loosing the pencil and using word groups make it much more fun, and give me the ability to copy ANYWHERE, anytime, while listening to my mp3 player. It seems as though my time expectations have lowered (when I'll be done and on the air), and my code learning has overall drastically slowed! Oh well, maybe by the time I'm ready to kick the bucket and got arthritis, I'll be ready to have my 20wpm or higher CW QSO's doing QRP. So what, the learning is fun, and the goal is to not struggle later. I took the letters "kmrsuapt" (the ones I knew at 20wpm) and threw in the letter "o" and "e" and put them in a SCRABBLE WORD FINDER and out popped a huge list of words. I filtered out the obscure ones and mixed them up and came out with...

(I'd recomend NOT throwing in the "e" without really thinking about it tho, because it is a VERY fast letter, and offers you NO TIME to think about it AT ALL)

I put the above text word files into Just Learn Morse Code program, and generated the audio files. Then I loaded them onto my mp3 player and now LISTEN to them RELIGIOUSLY on my daily bicycle rides. I really get in the groove much more than sitting at a desk for some reason. Don't ask me why, but It works and I enjoy it HUGELY.

I have many more word groups using less or more letters if any peeps need them.

Brian

Here is a frequency of use list (from wiki) for each letter of the alphabet by percent...E12.7% T9.06 A8.17 O7.51 I6.97 N6.75 S6.33 H6.09 R5.99 D4.25 L 4.025 C2.78 U2.76 M2.41 W2.36 F2.23 G 2.015 Y1.97 P1.93 X1.5 B1.49 V.98 K.77 J.15 Q.095 Z.074 I'm not sure why the various Kotch programs choose the letters "U,M,P, & K" as some of the first to learn, when they don't fall into the higher used common letters. The letter "U" is the least frequently found vowel in the most common words in the English language.

I can see the "K" as important to hams though, because of its use in callsigns. If the higher rated words were used (and learned) first (within reason) you could possibly find more words to generate by the online scrabble word finders, and add to a Morse learners audio file. Doesn't matter much as you have mastered the alphabet. I'd save the longer letters like "P" for later tho. Makes you wonder though. There must be a good reason for the letters used in the progression while learning.

The frequency of use in English is not particularly relevant, given amateur QSOs will contain plenty of abbreviations (like Q codes) and callsigns to skew the distribution. For learning it's far more important to get a balance between usefulness, recognisability and speed. I figure E is far too early in the LCWO progression. When it's introduced it makes the apparent speed leap up. Similarly, but not quite so badly, for T in the G4FON and JLMC sequences.

It's a pity that most of these programs have no option to choose a different sequence. It'd be nice to be able to swap between them, go to lesson 13 (or wherever) and know they were all using the same progression (even if you had to configure that progression yourself first time round).

It's a pity that most of these programs have no option to choose a different sequence. It'd be nice to be able to swap between them, go to lesson 13 (or wherever) and know they were all using the same progression (even if you had to configure that progression yourself first time round).

That's quite easy to do in G4FON. Simply increment the character count to 40 then go into Settings and all the characters will be there with a checkbox by each one. Just uncheck the ones you don't want to learn. Fully customizable.

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